by Colin Smith
First to take off were the two unarmed Lucioles manned by the jolly songsters of the night before, a little thick-headed perhaps and wondering why the English could not make decent coffee. Their destination was Ouakam airfield, a fighter base on the Cape Verde peninsula. They were to land there and convince its Vichy aircrew that it would be in everybody’s best interests if they rallied to the Free French. This was an important part of the plan because these squadrons flew American Curtiss Hawks, all-metal monoplane interceptors of the same generation as the Hawker Hurricanes currently duelling with Messerschmitts over southern England. Ark Royal’s Swordfish biplanes and lolloping Skuas were not in the same league.
The Lucioles landed safely and, as their engines were switched off, the base commander strode up to greet his unexpected visitors, probably assuming they came from one of the smaller landing strips around Dakar and had got lost in the fog. But once their identity had been established this officer made his views on the notorious outlaw Charles de Gaulle quite plain. The Luciole crews responded by tying him up. Then, somewhat optimistically in the circumstances, they proceeded to lay out on the ground some canvas signal panels which indicated to a Swordfish pilot flying low enough to read them that it was safe to go ahead with the next phase of the plan. This was for the Swordfish to land and unload from its cramped cockpits three Gaullist officers whose names were Gaillet, Scamaroni and Soufflet. Having completed his task, the British pilot took off and did a couple of circuits of the airfield and was then intercepted by a single Curtiss Hawk which opened fire and chased the Swordfish away. These appear to have been the first shots fired at Dakar and they were probably not intended to kill.
Other Swordfish crew were flying low over the town taking pictures of the harbour and its defences and scattering Free French leaflets except for the copies they had folded into their pockets as souvenirs. ‘Français de Dakar! Joignez-vous à nous pour délivrer la France,’ began a personal message from de Gaulle. There were individual messages for the army and the navy and a general one which began, ‘Dakar is threatened by the enemy and famine. We must save Dakar for France! We must resupply Dakar. This is why French forces under my orders have arrived.’ The literate minority read this with some astonishment since there was no rationing and little obvious hunger except that which had always existed among the poorest and often the most volatile of Dakar’s 100,000 Africans, the black sans-culottes.
Europeans numbered about 12,000 of whom roughly half were military and these were now standing at arms. On the wounded Richelieu, which had been painstakingly moved by tug to a safer berth behind a breakwater since Commander Bobby Bristowe’s July visit in his blackened motorboat, anti-aircraft gunners opened fire at the circling litter louts at 6.10 a.m. One aircraft was damaged but all managed to return to the Ark Royal, escorted part of the way by some Curtiss Hawks whose main interest seems to have been to get above the fog and discover exactly what was out there. Behind them at their Ouakam airfield base all seven of de Gaulle’s emissaries were now the prisoners of the station commander, sprung from bondage by a posse of his irate airmen whose loyalty to the maréchal was as unimpeachable as his own. A thorough search of these treacherous Churchill mercenaries yielded another prize: a list of all the known Gaullist sympathizers in Dakar worth listing. There were fourteen of them, including the mayor and the head of the Chamber of Commerce, and soon most of them had joined the Luciole pilots and the rest in the mosquito-filled cells normally reserved for African prisoners, with stinking buckets in the corner.
There were three code-named contingencies for Operation Menace: Situation Happy envisaged a rapturous reception for de Gaulle where the main danger would be that his troops were overwhelmed by the hospitality displayed by Boisson’s garrison in joyous vin d’honneur, Situation Sticky imagined the guns on the Richelieu and isolated shore batteries making a limited resistance to which there would be a firm but limited response; Situation Nasty was a gloves-off reaction to a complete breakdown in negotiations and determined opposition, in which case the Free French would step aside to avoid fratricidal strife while the British first bombarded then took the port by frontal assault. Throughout, de Gaulle was to broadcast emollient radio appeals from the Westernland for Dakar to see reason while always hinting that, although he was talking quietly, he was carrying a big British stick.
By noon on the first day it had become obvious that Situation Happy it was not. The fate of the airmen and the others landed at Ouakam airfield was still unknown. But there was no mistaking the reception accorded to the naval emissary whom de Gaulle had regarded as one of his trump cards.
Capitaine de corvette Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, brother of a général who had been killed in May 1940 during the first days of the blitzkrieg, was a respected not to say unique figure in naval circles because he was also a monk. During 1914–18 he served in a patrol boat and distinguished himself rescuing hundreds of men from a sinking troopship. Then in 1920, aged 31, he had resigned his commission to become Brother Louis de la Trinté of the Barefoot Carmelites and study theology in Lille. In 1939 he was a mendicant friar doing social work in Paris when, a few days before the outbreak of hostilities, he returned to the navy as a reserve lieutenant. It seems that his religious superiors were under the impression he was going to serve as a chaplain. But when Rommel’s panzers captured d’Argenlieu in June 1940 he was helping to defend the Cherbourg arsenal. A few days later the Carmelite leapt from the crammed prisoner train taking him to Germany and, like de Gaulle, got to England via Jersey. It was d’Argenlieu who had given his new commander the idea to adopt as the emblem of Free France the double-barred Cross of Lorraine – about to become part of Germany along with its iron ore deposits for the second time since 1870.
An hour after the Lucioles had landed at Ouakam, two motorboats from the Free French sloop Savorgnan de Brazza, which, covered by the fog, had got to within 3 miles of Dakar undetected, reached the harbour’s Mole No.2. On arrival one of them tied up while the other, which contained a covering party of a dozen armed men, stayed a little behind with its engine running. Both boats were flying large white flags and Gaullist tricolours. The monk d’Argenlieu was in the first boat heading a delegation that included Capitaine Henri Bécourt-Foch, grandson of Maréchal Foch, and ten others bearing letters from de Gaulle to Boisson and the army and navy commanders. The letters expressed de Gaulle’s confidence that he would be able to land his forces so that together they could fight for the liberation of their country but warned that any opposition would incur the intervention of the accompanying Allied forces ‘whose mission is to prevent, by all means at their disposal, any risk of the Dakar base falling into the hands of the enemy’.
The first person to greet them was a naval guard commanded by a lieutenant waving a revolver who was shortly replaced by a more senior officer named Lorfevre who announced that he would hand the letters over. D’Argenlieu said that his orders were to give them to the people they were addressed to personally. Lorfevre sent the lieutenant off to get instructions from Amiral Landriau, the Vichy naval commander. While they were waiting, d’Argenlieu, a tall, fine-featured man, looked around the harbour and, trying to break an awkward silence, said, ‘You have a nice little fleet here.’
Lorfevre: Yes, and it’s ready to defend itself.
D’Argenlieu: We too are a group with a lot of esprit de corps.
Lorfevre: You belong to a religious order and I am myself a believer. We know how to examine our conscience. I have examined mine and I’m absolutely convinced that I’ve done my duty.
D’Argenlieu: Our duty was first of all to fulfil our obligations to England. [A reference to the Anglo-French agreement not to make a separate peace with Germany.]
Lorfevre: I obey my legitimate orders.
D’Argenlieu: Our superiors have betrayed us.
Lorfevre: What about Mers-el-Kébir?
But before d’Argenlieu could reply the lieutenant was back with a message from the amiral saying that the Ga
ullist delegation should leave immediately. D’Argenlieu, rather like Hooky Holland at Mers-el-Kébir in July, was insisting that he must be allowed to deliver his important messages when Lorfevre was called away to answer a telephone call at the guard post. When he returned d’Argenlieu detected a change in his attitude, more conciliatory, as if he were playing for time, and he also noticed that the guards were now standing between his delegation and the boats except for a sergeant who had moved closer to him. Towards the other end of the mole there was some commotion and he saw that a score of men carrying rifles with fixed bayonets had appeared and were running towards them. Brother Louis did not hesitate. He gave the sergeant an ungodly kick in the balls and led the rush back to the boats.
A minute later they had all scrambled on board and were following their support craft out to sea, white flags whipping in the wind. D’Argenlieu’s instincts had been right. Amiral Landriau had changed his mind and decided to take them prisoner. Nor were their troubles over. The platoon he had despatched to arrest them tumbled into an old tug and attempted to cut them off. A few ineffectual shots were fired from a machine gun mounted on her bows but it soon became apparent that the motorboats were much faster and before long they were well out of range. All that remained was to get past the harbour’s outer defences on Gorée Island. It was from here that a well-aimed burst hit the second boat which then veered off into the fog, though not before both d’Argenlieu and a Capitaine Perrin had been wounded.
They were both brought to the Westernland where the nurses had set up a casualty station in the dining room of the Dutch liner, while de Gaulle and Spears were on the bridge scanning the shoreline through binoculars. There was a new development: the batteries on Cape Manuel had opened fire and the splashes from their shells were creeping closer to the ships. As usual, to correct fall of shot, the French rounds emitted a coloured smoke on impact with sea or solid. The colour for these coastal guns was yellow. In the dining room the English nurse Susan Travers was attending to Capitaine Perrin, who had just asked her name, when she was distracted by a glimpse through the nearest porthole of a bright flavescent spume of frothy Atlantic. ‘Don’t be afraid, Susan,’ said her patient, who was bleeding in several places. ‘They’re just bluffing.’
It seems Admiral Cunningham was thinking along the same lines. He sent a polite radio message: ‘If fire continues on my ships I shall regretfully be compelled to return it.’ Back came the reply: ‘If you do not wish me to fire remove yourself more than 20 miles from Dakar.’ Not since France’s victory at Fontenoy in 1745, when Lord Hay of the Foot Guards foolishly invited the French to fire first, had the two old enemies been so murderously polite to each other.
Almost an hour later the British started to shoot back, the battleships directing their 15-inch guns at the forts and the Richelieu. The French ship had been firing at them with almost equal weight from the one 380mm four-gun turret it had working. Both sides were firing blind in the fog without effective aerial spotting or being sufficiently into the century for radar-controlled gunnery. First blood went to one of the Vichy French coastal batteries. A single 9.4-inch shell hit the Cumberland, the cruiser that had stopped the scuttled Poitiers, killing seven of her crew and seriously wounding two more. It holed the ship about 6 inches above the armour plate on her port side and exploded sufficiently far into her innards to add scalding from a severed steam pipe to shrapnel and blast wounds. As soon as one fire was put out another started up and power failures stopped the boiler room fans so that the stokers could work only ten-minute shifts.
Cumberland limped off to apply what first aid she could, committed her dead to the deep, and was given permission to retire to Bathurst in the Gambia where she arrived battered, scorched and short of drinking water. ‘We felt generally fed up,’ noted the teenage Midshipman Emden in his log. ‘One shell had put us out of action and we had not fired a shot in anger.’
Back at Dakar shots in anger were multiplying and for some of the combatants Situations Sticky and Nasty were already indistinguishable. The destroyer Foresight was part of the anti-submarine screen and one of the closest ships to shore. As an additional task, newly joined Midshipman Tony Syms had been supposed to take the ship’s motorboat to within loud-hailing distance of the beach with a young Gaullist army officer on board. Fortunately for all concerned, once his passenger’s compatriots had made it clear that they were not interested in conversation, this was cancelled.
Syms, not yet 20 and a veteran on the cruiser Manchester of the Norwegian campaign, soon found himself admiring the coloured French shell splashes and thinking how useful this marking system would have been when he met up with the Kriegsmarine off Narvik.
My action station was in the wheel house in charge of the plot. There was no plotting to be done. We knew where we were and the enemy was static. We fired back in their general direction naturally, but more to keep our spirits up than to engage any clearly observed target … A-gun was hit and a great sheet of flame [from ammunition] flared up and blew back over B-gun deck towards the bridge. This was the one occasion in the war when I thought I was going to die immediately as I was sure we would blow up. Transfixed, I silently began to count to ten while waiting for the explosion. Number ten came but brought no explosion and the flames subsided. In the wheel house we realised that we might still have a future. The Captain, on the compass platform above, fortunately not bothered with counting to ten, promptly ordered ‘Full Ahead’ and we accelerated to get clear but not before the shore batteries registered another hit passing through our pendant numbers [destroyers had names and numbers – Foresight’s was H68] on the port side and out through our pendant numbers on the starboard side before exploding but wrecking our wireless office on its way through. Point blank stuff, not to be prolonged.
Four of the destroyer’s crew had been killed: a telegraphist, two able seamen and a cook. But though well-holed, the Foresight was still able to fight and remained on her patrol line.
Cunningham had twice warned that vessels attempting to leave harbour would be engaged and when the submarine Persée tried to sneak out on the surface she was hit by a 6-inch shell from the Barham then depth-charged by the cruiser Dragon. Most of the submariners were saved. The Porthos, among fifty or so merchant ships in the port, received one of the British battleships’ 15-inch shells and caught fire. Similar packages fell indiscriminately on the vegetable gardens of officers’ wives and ancient courtyards packed with humanity.
The airwaves were also busy with two-way traffic. ‘Come, good Frenchmen of Dakar, there is still time. Impose your will on the guilty ones who are firing on Frenchmen,’ appealed de Gaulle from the Westernland.
‘Blood is already flowing and it’s your responsibility!’ roared a furious Governor Boisson who, being stone deaf in one ear from the same shell that deprived him of his leg, tended to shout down the microphone at the Radio Dakar studio. Nor was his temper helped by his conviction, shared with most of his contemporaries, that he was dealing with a treacherous adventurer and British puppet.
Although de Gaulle did not shout back, he was equally unimpressed and the day was not very old – 10.20 – when he began to take a much firmer line with his unseen adversary. ‘The French ships and troops which are accompanying me must enter Dakar. If they meet with resistance, the large Allied forces following me will take the matter in hand.’
But in late afternoon, it was the Free French who attempted to raise the stakes when, with the encouragement of their allies, they began Plan Charles. This was a fallback scheme to go ashore at Rufisque Bay, about 13 miles east of Dakar and well out of range of its heavy guns but less than a day’s march away along a good coast road. It was formerly the main outlet for transferring peanut exports from lighters to merchant ships anchored in the bay and had a couple of jetties and a small lighthouse as well as several other good landing places. From Rufisque they could take the port from the rear and de Gaulle decided that the first wave would be some 180 fusiliers marins, French marin
es who had mainly come over to him from the ships seized at British ports, and would be landed from three sloops, two of which had sufficiently shallow draught to get to one of the jetties. Once they had established a bridgehead, preferably without bloodshed, Monclar’s Legionnaires would be ferried ashore from the Free Dutch liners in a second wave.
The British arranged to cover the landings with HMAS Australia, an 8-inch-gun heavy cruiser that had replaced the torpedoed Fiji, and two destroyers, Fury and Greyhound. It took some time to get all the ships in the right place. This was mostly because of poor radio communications between Cunningham on the Barham and de Gaulle on the Westernland where cypher operators were often having difficulties decoding messages. Added to this fog of war was the literal fog, still there and sometimes reducing visibility to a couple of hundred yards, though patchy in places. It was through one of these gaps in the goo that a French aircraft spotted the Free French ships heading towards Rufisque. The fast super-destroyer L’Audacieux came out to have a better look with the sloop Surprise doing her best to keep up but soon falling out of sight. They were followed by the cruisers Georges Leygues, Montcalm and Le Malin, another destroyer that was practically a light cruiser in British terms with big guns – 5.5-inch – on a light hull design.
Australia spotted L’Audacieux shortly after the French ship had emerged through the gate in the anti-submarine net to the east of Goree Island. Behind and a little above the bridge, on an air defence position crammed with range finders and expensive optics, was Midshipman Stuart Farquharson-Roberts, a bearded 18-year-old who was one of four Royal Navy ‘middies’ aboard. Below him he could hear Captain Robert Ross Stewart, who was also Royal Navy, asking the Australian officers surrounding him if anybody could speak French. Nobody could. ‘I called down, “I know some French, sir.” He told me to come and give him the words for: “If you don’t turn back I’ll sink you.” This I did with the aid of a dictionary for “sink”.’ They flashed this over with an Aldis lamp and L’Audacieux made a one word reply which an uncomprehending signaller spelt out letter by letter: J-A-M-A-I-S.